Akhlesh Lakhtakia

Akhlesh Lakhtakia

An international team of researchers has designed decoys that mimic female emerald ash borer beetles and successfully entice male emerald ash borers to land on them in an attempt to mate, only to be electrocuted and killed by high-voltage current.

Subjectivity is problematic when evaluating fingerprints, and quality is in the eye of the examiner. But three computer programs used together can give fingerprint grading unprecedented consistency and objectivity, according to Penn State researchers.

Coating a bone graft with an inorganic compound found in bones and teeth may significantly increase the likelihood of a successful implant, according to Penn State researchers. The researchers -- collaborators from the College of Medicine's Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation and the College of Engineering's Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics -- also believe this method could be used for soft musculoskeletal tissue implants and orthopedic device implants.

Scientists and inventors have often been inspired by the changing designs of nature. “For over a billion years,” Akhlesh Lakhtakia says, “many structures have evolved to display interesting and useful properties. This is an idea we humans should exploit.”

"How small is nano?" Akhlesh Lakhtakia asked students, faculty, and community members during the final session of the fall season of Research Unplugged. "Divide an inch into 25 pieces," he said. "Then divide each piece into one million pieces. Each of those pieces is one nanometer."

Scientific illiteracy abounds in America. One recent poll, funded by the National Science Foundation, found that fewer than half those interviewed knew that the Earth takes one year to orbit the Sun.

Unfortunately, grade-school teachers are not immune. And if teachers can't make sense of basic scientific concepts— if they can't "integrate them into their own understanding," as Vincent Lunetta, a Penn State professor of curriculum and instruction, puts it—then it is next to impossible for their pupils to do so.

Liquid crystals, that curious phase of matter between solid and liquid, play tricks with light: they change its direction of vibration as it traverses them. Some liquid crystals split light into left and right-handed rays, whose vibrations describe opposing spirals as they pass through a crystal's layers. "One ray rotates clockwise, the other counterclockwise, at different velocities," explains Akhlesh Lakhtakia.

What if we. . . . ran an undersea pipeline from the mouth of the Amazon to the northwest coast of Africa, carrying enough fresh water to quench the thirst of the northern Sahara? Such a tunnel, 4,300 kilometers long and 80 meters in diameter, would provide more than 1,000 times the amount of fresh water that desalination plants could muster using the same amount of energy. It could render a million square kilometers habitable.